Negative transfer in children's recall of categorized materials

A negative transfer paradigm was used to assess kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade (approximately 5, 9, and 12 years old) children's use of category relations in lists presented for recall. Negative transfer effects increased with age, with kindergarten children showing no evidence of interference relative to a control group.     

Visuospatial competency, handedness, and cerebral dominance

The present study addressed the question of Levy's (1974, Psychobiological implications of bilateral assymetry. In S. Dimond &; J. G. Beaumont, Hemispheric function in the human brain, NY: Halstead. Pp. 121–183.) proposal that left handers would have lowered spatial skills relative to verbal skills. In the first part of the study, performance on the PMA (visuospatial subtest) and WAIS Block Design subtest were compared between right and left handed high school and college samples. No support could be found for deficient visuo-spatial performance in the left handers. In the second part of the experiment, no relative impairment of visuospatial skills was found when subjects were classified into predicted speech dominance groups on the basis of a dichotic listening task and/or a visual half-field task. An extreme groups comparison of the most left dominant and most right dominant groups again yielded no significant differences in visuo-spatial performance. Finally, the relationship between degree of speech lateralization and visuo-spatial skills was examined. Only partial support for differences in cerebral organization for speech in left handers was found in the college sample.     

Measurement and comparison of anxiety levels of parents of stuttering, articulatory defective, and normal-speaking children

This study was conducted to determine whether or not parents of stutterers are generally more anxious than parents of nonstutterers. In addition, the situational anxiety attendant upon the viewing of their own children was compared with that of parents of articulatory defective and normal-speaking children. Seven sets of parents of stutterers, articulatory defective, and normal speaking children (N = 42) were administered the A-Trait measure of the Self-Evaluation Questionnaire (Spielberger et al., 1965) before and after viewing videotapes of their own chilg and a child of each of the two other groups. Results indicating that parents of stuttering children exhibit more situational anxiety than parents in either of the other two groups are discussed in terms of their clinical implications.     

Hemispheric function and linguistic skill in the deaf

The nature of hemispheric processing in the prelingually deaf was examined in a picture-letter matching task. It was hypothesized that linguistic competence in the deaf would be associated with normal or near-normal laterality (i.e., a left hemisphere advantage for analytic linguistic tasks). Subjects were shown a simple picture of a common object (e.g., lamp), followed by brief unilateral presentation of a manually signed or orthographic letter, and they had to indicate as quickly as possible whether the letter was present in the spelling of the object's label. While hearing subjects showed a marked left hemisphere advantage, no such superiority was found for either a linguistically skilled or unskilled group of deaf students. In the skilled group, however, there was a suggestion of a right hemisphere advantage for manually signed letters. It was concluded that while hemispheric asymmetry of function does not develop normally in the deaf, the absence of this normal pattern does not preclude the development of the analytic skills needed to deal with the structure of language.     

Relative efficacy of different encoding structures and judgment topics in a cued-recall task

Existing research on the relative efficacy of the self as an encoding structure applies more to the self as an object than as a cognitive structure that guides the organization of incoming information. In order to provide a task that would be more directly relevant to encoding, subjects were asked to watch an interview of a resident assistant (RA) candidate by the housing department and to attend throughout to how similar the candidate's presentation was to the one they themselves or a typical RA would have given in the situation. Furthermore, judgments of similarity were divided into personality, ability, and nonverbal style. The dependent variable was a surprise cued-recall task, administered 20 min after the videotaped interview had ended. Consistent with prediction, subjects instructed to encode from a self-perspective exhibited better recall than those instructed to encode from a typical RA perspective. Also, as predicted, subjects who judged personality or ability similarity recalled more of the interview than those who judged nonverbal style similarity. Enhanced recall from the self-encoding perspective was consistent across all three types of judgments (personality, ability, nonverbal style), suggesting that the self is an efficient processing structure across a variety of diverse judgment topics.     

Processing of faces by patients with unilateral hemisphere lesions. I. Dissociation between judgments of facial affect and facial identity

In this study, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) subjects performed significantly worse than LHD and NHD controls across a series of seven facial identity and facial affect tasks. Even when the patient groups were statistically equated on a measure of visuoperceptual ability, the RHD group remained impaired on three emotional tasks--naming, picking, and discriminating emotional faces. These findings suggest that the defects shown by RHD patients on facial affect tasks cannot be solely attributed to defects in visuoperceptual processing and that the right-hemisphere superiority for processing facial affect exists above and beyond its superiority for processing facial identity.     

Children's reasoning about the causes of human behavior

Three studies examined young children's ability to predict how certain internal and external conditions affect behavior. Study 1 included 136 children from early preschool, late preschool, kindergarten, and second grade. A forced choice procedure revealed that even the youngest group could predict the effect of various internal-personal causes (e.g., interest, intelligence) and external-situational causes (e.g., rewards, adult pressure). Older preschoolers and second graders considered these internal causes more powerful than these external causes. With the same procedure, in Study 2 the 16 preschoolers predicted that both physical characteristics (e.g., strength, energy level) and the internal-personal characteristics of Study 1 affect performance in athletic activities. In addition, they considered the physical causes more important. Study 3 examined more complex types of causal reasoning. Younger preschoolers responded randomly but older preschoolers combined two causes to create a greater effect than one cause and used an external cause to enhance, rather than discount, an internal cause. The discussion focused on the cognitive development underlying developmental differences in the ability to predict behavior on the basis of one or two causes.     

More and more and more about more

Three experiments explored the development of three linguistic aspects of more in children's speech. Subjects were 56 children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. Experiment 1 addressed the nature of the early semantic content of more. Experiment 2 examined the child's differentiation of mass more from count more. Experiment 3 explored the child's use of more as a comparative marker on adjectives. The results suggest, first, that the child initially stores the meaning of more with a prototype, rather than with some more systematic, featural representation. In addition, children's linguistic understanding of the dual use of more as a quantifier of mass amounts and count amounts does not appear to develop until long after they have been using more appropriately in unambiguous contexts. Finally, children learn to use more as a marker on comparatives only after they have acquired -er as a comparative marker, and some time after they have been using more successfully in nonadjectival constructions.     

An evaluation of outcome variables in the systematic desensitization of test anxiety.

This study investigated the effects of group systematic desensitization and group counseling on anxiety and academic performance. Fifty-four undergraduates who requested help for debilitating test anxiety were randomly assigned to Desensitization. Group Counseling, or No-treatment control groups. Measures of test anxiety, trait anxiety, and academic achievement were obtained for all students' pre- and post-treatment. The Desensitization group showed a significant decrease in test anxiety; the Counseling and No-treatment groups showed no changes in these measures. None of the groups showed any change in trait anxiety or academic achievement. The results provided evidence that systematic desensitization was an effective treatment for reducing test anxiety, but not for improving grades.     

Cardiac deceleration in newborns: habituation, dishabituation, and offset responses.

Twenty healthy, 1–4 day-old infants were selected from a sample of 135 neonates on the basis of alertness during testing. The infants were presented mild intensity colored light with gradual onset and offset while heart rate was monitored. Half the infants received six exposures to blue light followed by two exposures to blue-green light, whereas remaining subjects received colors in reverse order. Stimulus duration was 20 sec and variable periods between stimuli averaged 30 sec. Results of trend analysis of variance of the second-by-second cardiac data indicated that for infants older than the median age, the decelerative responses to both stimulus onset and offset were significant. Further, these subjects' onset decelerations significantly habituated within the six stimulus repetitions and significantly dishabituated with change in the stimulus color. Offset decelerations incremented over habituation trials and decremented with change in stimulus color. Responses of younger subjects were more variable which probably reflects their less complete recovery from the effects of maternal medication and the birth process.